School Lunch Politics (15 page)

CHAPTER 4

 

A National School Lunch Program

The
Ladies Home Journal
of October 1944 told American housewives that a new “national disease” threatened America's children. “Johnny's bones aren't straight and Susie can't seem to grasp her [arithmetic] problems,” the
Journal
ominously observed. Both Susie and Johnny suffered from malnutrition. Writing at the end of World War II, the
Journal
warned that malnutrition sapped the nation's civic strength and threatened domestic as well as military security. The editors suggested a simple solution. The government should provide all American children with a hot lunch every day at school. In other words, Congress should permanently fund the school lunch program that the Department of Agriculture had been operating on year-by-year appropriations since the mid-1930s. For over half a century, the
Journal
said, Congress and the Department of Agriculture sponsored programs to improve livestock and farm crops and to protect commodity prices. It was now time to do the same for the nation's children.
¹

Two years later, in June 1946, Congress created the National School Lunch Program “as a measure of national security, to safeguard the health and well-being of the Nation's children and to encourage the domestic consumption of nutritious agricultural commodities and other foods.”
²
It was a historic act and a triumph for a generation of home economists, nutritionists, and child welfare advocates who had long struggled to improve American diets. It was also a triumph for the Department of Agriculture and a generation of farm policy makers who believed that government-supported price supports were essential to the growth and prosperity of the farm sector. When President Harry Truman signed the bill into law, he declared that “no nation is any healthier than its children or more prosperous than its farmers.” The School Lunch Bill, he assured the American public, “contributed immeasurably to both.”
³
Yet the health and welfare of farmers and of children were not so obviously linked, nor were children's welfare activists and farmers such natural allies. Indeed, the two groups continually vied for control over the American diet, most particularly, children's meal programs. Child welfare reformers used the apparent success of wartime school lunch programs to begin pushing hard for post-war universal child nutrition programs. At the same time, Agriculture Department officials mobilized their own political networks—par ticularly southern Democrats—to lobby for a long-term congressional commitment to a federal surplus commodity support system.

The 1946 National School Lunch Act was an uneasy compromise among an unusual set of allies. That the bill was passed at all had more to do with the influence of southern Democrats in Congress and the power of the agricultural lobby than with a public commitment to nutrition education or even to children's welfare. Nutrition reformers and child welfare advocates, of course, enthusiastically greeted the School Lunch Act as the culmination of their campaign to improve American diets. The 1946 bill, however, bore little resemblance to the type of child nutrition program reformers had envisioned. Instead, it reflected both the constraints of American regional and racial politics and the limits of the New Deal welfare system. The nature of the school lunch compromise revealed much about the fate of social policy and the nature of American food and agricultural policies after World War II. Ultimately, the administrative structure of the school lunch program limited its ability to deliver universal child nutrition or to feed poor children. Nonetheless, despite their aversion to liberal social programs, southern Democratic legislators oversaw the creation of one of the nation's most enduring and popular federal entitlement programs.

President Harry Truman's post-war political agenda, dubbed the “Fair Deal,” promised to continue federal oversight of the social welfare and economic support programs initiated by New Deal Democrats. Between 1946 and 1950, for example, in addition to the School Lunch Act, Congress endorsed public housing, expanded Social Security coverage, and raised the minimum wage.
⁴
The 1946 National School Lunch Program optimistically promised prosperity for farmers and nutrition for children, an essential combination in maintaining strong citizens, a healthy democracy, and national security in the post-war world. Historian Alan Brinkley has characterized the post-war liberal agenda as one aimed at increasing consumer prosperity rather than reshaping “the economic and social environment.”
⁵
Promising to protect the agricultural economy while at the same time encouraging the consumption of American farm products, a federally subsidized school lunch program fit such an agenda very well. Like Truman's Fair Deal, however, the school lunch program had serious limitations. The post-war liberal agenda foundered on the fraying coalition of conservative southerners and liberal reformers that had sustained New Deal social programs. While the southern part of the coalition stuck with the Democratic president when it came to national security, they were less willing to go along with post-war civil rights or labor-oriented initiatives. Domestic legislation, couched in idealistic rhetoric—increasingly so as the Cold War heated up—often fell short of effective delivery. Truman's housing initiative, for example, while promising affordable housing for all Americans, in fact built very few units.
⁶
The Democrats created the National Science Foundation and the Atomic Energy Act, but were unable to enact health insurance or convince Congress to pass any substantial aid to education. Ultimately, school lunch politics, like the postwar liberal agenda, could not reconcile national goals—equal opportunity and social welfare—with local inequalities and entrenched regional power.

A
GRICULTURE OR
E
DUCATION
?

Nutrition reformers emerged from World War II optimistic that the nation's post-war prosperity would finally ensure not only sufficient food but proper nutrition for all Americans. The growth of the Community School Lunch Program during the war convinced nutritionists as well as children's welfare advocates that the moment for universal children's lunch was at hand. Children's Bureau physician Martha May Eliot observed that “nutrition is the next great problem and the new task.”
⁷
She believed that “a free lunch of optimum nutritional value for every school child” should be a central post-war goal.
⁸
Faith Williams, veteran child welfare advocate and head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics Cost of Living Division, confided to the Department of Agriculture's school lunch administrator, M. L. Wilson, “I personally have come to be of the opinion that free school lunches should be made available to all children in public schools.”
⁹
Williams and Eliot were not alone in their conviction that postwar America should provide healthy lunches to all children. At the very least, Bureau of Home Economic nutritionists Lucy Gillett and Hazel Kyrk believed, the post-war Congress should make free lunches available to all low income or “needy” children. By the war's end, a national school lunch program was squarely on the legislative agenda for children's welfare reformers.
¹⁰

School lunches were also on the post-war agricultural agenda. World War II expanded the role of government in food production and distribution and consolidated the power of policy makers within the Department of Agriculture, most notably, those who promoted a strategy of mechanization, productivity, and price supports. Despite the fact that the agricultural surplus had all but disappeared with the start of the war, farm-bloc representatives and agricultural planners were convinced that the commodity disposal program would be essential to the health of the post-war farm sector. Agricultural economists such as H. R. Tolley, Milo Perkins, and M. L. Wilson continued to believe that government oversight of com modity prices—buying the surplus and donating it to schools—would ensure farmers ready markets for surplus commodities and build demand for new food products. The nation's basic agricultural supply problems, they were convinced, had not disappeared but, rather, could “be expected to recur in intensified form,” unless “intelligent plans” were made to meet the problem after the war.
¹¹
A school lunch program, Tolley and Perkins believed, would act as an insurance policy in the event post-war agricultural prices began to fall. As early as 1943, then, with the support of major farm and food industry groups including the Dairymen's League, the Grange, the American Farm Bureau Federation, and the Independent Grocer's Association, Tolley and Perkins began to draft legislation that would permanently authorize a national school lunch program as an outlet for surplus farm products.

It was not hard to gain the support of food and nutrition reformers or of children's welfare advocates for a federal school meal plan. The New Deal “women's dominion” of child welfare advocates and social reformers enthusiastically mobilized to support the creation of a national school lunch program.
¹²
In their view, however, a permanent program needed to be part of a broad-based social welfare agenda and should no longer be controlled by the Department of Agriculture. The Women's Joint Congressional Committee, for example, speaking for mainstream women's organizations, declared that the Department of Agriculture had begun “a very fine piece of work,” but that a permanent school lunch program would be most effective “if it were under the more intimate supervision of the Office of Education.”
¹³
National Education Association spokesman Dr. Howard Dawson agreed. A school lunch program, he said, is “more than feeding children.” Nutrition should be, he said, “fundamental in the educational program and should be administered according to the proper pattern.”
¹⁴
Indeed, with the disappearance of the agricultural surplus, nutrition reform became the most persuasive justification for continuing the program. Agnes Winn of the National Education Association told the House Committee on Agriculture in 1945 that “the program can no longer be defended as a means for lifting the economic level of rural life.” The main reason for continuing the program, in her view, was in terms of “the educational and health objectives which are advanced as the food habits of youth are intelligently changed and improved.”
¹⁵
General Federation of Women's Clubs spokeswoman Mrs. Harvey W. Wiley put it bluntly: “The main question is the health of our children.” In the post-war years, she continued, American children would need to better “absorb the education provided for them to fit them for democratic living.”
¹⁶

At the end of the war, American policy makers could also look abroad for models of child health and welfare plans that included school lunch programs. In England, for example, historian James Vernon argues, school meals, which had traditionally been part of state or private charitable programs, were taken over by the treasury to become universal in scope. Where in the United States, state-sponsored school lunches were rooted in agricultural policy, in Britain school meals formed an important element in the post-war welfare state. According to one account, expansion of school meals and milk “as quickly as possible” became part of British national food policy in 1940. Taking children's health and nutrition to be a national responsibility, the British War Cabinet increased the number of school meals served and provided milk for every child. Where prewar school lunches were “of a poor quality, at the end of the war, “both the quantity and quality of service” improved. Described as “a revolution in the attitude of parents, teachers, and children,” British school lunches no longer were regarded as charity but, rather, “became a social service, fused into school life.”
¹⁷
This, indeed, was the model American reformers were after.

While the American social welfare community and school officials believed school lunches should, by right, be educational in nature, the political clout necessary to gain congressional support for a national program resided solidly in the Department of Agriculture. The USDA continued to be one of the most powerful agencies in the federal bureaucracy. At the start of World War II, for example, the Department of Agriculture absorbed fully 10 percent of the total federal budget. Between 1930 and 1946 the number of USDA employees jumped from 25,741 to 75,199, and the department budget increased over eight-fold.
¹⁸
By 1944, the Department of Agriculture had an enormous investment in school lunch programs in terms of food supply, menu planning, and administrative bureaucracy. Under the leadership of USDA officials, farm state representatives, particularly those from the South, had come to view school lunches as an important element in the surplus commodity program. Southern representatives also saw school lunches as part of the department's extension service serving rural families and bringing what they considered to be modern farm techniques to the region. Senate Agriculture Committee chairman Richard Russell, for one, made it clear that his support for a school lunch program hinged on its remaining in the USDA. The program, he said, came into being “in that paradoxical age when we had so much food to eat that people were starving and farmers were producing so much that they were going into bankruptcy because they could not dispose of their products.”
¹⁹
The main reason he continued to “so strongly” support the program, he announced, “is that I think the continuation of the schoollunch program depends on [the agricultural] feature.”
²⁰
If school lunches were “not connected with the disposition of surpluses,” Russell declared, he would vote to disband the program.
²¹

T
HE
L
IBERAL
C
OMPROMISE